Why CTEM Needs Human Context: The Role of Ethical Hackers in Exposure Management

The modern-day enterprise attack surface is inherently complex, consisting of endpoints, applications, websites, databases, APIs, and other resources that unauthorized or malicious users target to gain access to their systems or steal sensitive, confidential, or business-critical data. To mitigate the risk and impact of this happening, it’s vital that security teams have a scalable way to continuously identify their most critical threats and exposures based on business impact, attack path viability, and likelihood of exploitation.

Here’s where continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) comes in.

CTEM combines automation with human-delivered insights to ensure effective risk reduction within the evolving enterprise attack surface.

This blog explores the role of automation in enabling your organization’s CTEM program while also highlighting why human ethical hackers are crucial to ensuring that the program effectively minimizes exposure to the threats that matter most.

Why Organizations Need Continuous Threat Exposure Management

Gartner describes CTEM as a systematic and holistic 5-step process for continually evaluating the “accessibility, exposure, and exploitability of digital and physical assets”.¹ Unlike vulnerability management, which is a reactive approach and focuses only on identifying and remediating vulnerabilities as they arise, CTEM is proactive and considers both vulnerabilities and the constantly evolving attack surface.

The idea is to continuously assess the organization’s risk exposure to discover points of vulnerability, assess which of those vulnerabilities pose true threats, and align remediation plans with business goals and compliance frameworks. By reframing exposure management into a continuous cycle, CTEM enables security teams to unceasingly identify, assess, prioritize, validate, and remediate the most critical exposures – before they become problems. In doing so, it empowers organizations to harden their attack surface and maintain a resilient security posture.

The Importance of Automation for CTEM

Risk-based prioritization, threat validation, and exposure risk determination are three of CTEM’s key underlying principles. The goal is not to address every vulnerability and foil every threat, but to prioritize and address the threats that are most likely to hurt the business. Here’s where a security testing approach like pentesting, also known as ethical hacking, can be very useful.

Pentesting exercises are simulated, deliberate cyberattacks on enterprise systems using the same tools and techniques used by real attackers. The tester’s objective is to provide the insights that security teams need to proactively identify and fix security loopholes before a real attack can materialize.

Automated, AI-enabled systems play a critical role in CTEM.

For one, they automate routine/repetitive/cumbersome ethical hacking tasks so security personnel can effectively manage various aspects of exposure management without getting overwhelmed. AI can enhance this process by analyzing vast amounts of security data to identify patterns and anomalies that may indicate the presence of a threat. Thirdly, AI and automation ensure more efficient risk prioritization by calculating comprehensive risk scores from a broad range of factors and systems like CVSS, OSINT, OWASP Top 10, etc.

That said, automation is just one aspect of a robust, high-ROI CTEM program. Skilled human ethical hackers are equally essential to ensure effective CTEM.

How Human Ethical Hackers Complement Automation in CTEM

Automated pentesting tools cannot always contextually interpret data to determine if a vulnerability represents a genuine threat. Human ethical hackers bring unique abilities like critical analysis, judgment, creativity, and decision-making that allow them to make these interpretations and determine the most appropriate threat response.

Automated systems may also have inherent biases that can affect their outcomes. Some outcomes may be false positives, i.e., the tool may incorrectly alert that a threat is present when it’s not. Too many false positives can lead to alert fatigue among security teams. Other outcomes may be false negatives, i.e., the tool may fail to identify a threat that is present. Too many false negatives can create security gaps that increase the risk of attack.

Finally, automated systems may not be able to identify and flag the unconventional tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by some threat actors. This may increase the organization’s threat exposure and risk of attack.

Human ethical hackers are indispensable to address these limitations of automated tools.

These experts apply their pentesting experience plus in-depth knowledge of attackers and attacker TTPs to:

• Understand attacker behaviors,
• Anticipate potential threats,
• Prioritize the most attractive exposures to attackers, and
• Suggest robust threat prevention measures.

Unlike most automated tools, human analysts can develop a comprehensive view of the enterprise attack surface from a potential (human) attacker’s perspective, even if the attacker behaves in unexpected or novel ways. They can truly understand the attacker mentality to provide more comprehensive exposure management than would be possible with automation alone.

Security leaders can also benefit significantly from using automated security testing tools like attack surface management (ASM), automated penetration testing, and adversarial exposure validation (AEV), not to replace their internal security personnel, but to scale their capabilities. This enables them to test their attack surfaces more broadly and more frequently, solving the scalability challenge that many enterprises face within their CTEM programs.

Effective, Robust CTEM with BreachLock’s Hybrid Security Testing Approach

The BreachLock Platform aligns with and supports enterprise CTEM programs by automating routine pentesting tasks to reduce the burden of manual testing and enhance testing accuracy. Security teams can use the platform to run automated, high-frequency assessments across a range of assets, including applications, APIs, internal and external infrastructure, cloud environments, IoT, LLMs, and more. Moreover, the platform combines continuous attack surface discovery and monitoring, automated retesting, vulnerability prioritization, and reporting into a single interface, thus providing adaptive, actionable, full-spectrum threat exposure management for complex attack surfaces.

BreachLock recently added its Gen AI-powered adversarial exposure validation (AEV) technology to the platform, enabling users to launch unlimited, multi-step, threat-intelligence-led attack scenarios autonomously. Users control every aspect of every engagement, with full control over the scope, intensity, and techniques employed. We show you exactly which exposures matter most, giving you attack path visuals with evidence to reveal where your defenses succeeded and failed.

Honoring the importance of human experts in security testing, BreachLock employs a deep bench of in-house, certified ethical hackers who use advanced tools and techniques to simulate complex real-world attack scenarios that go beyond basic vulnerability testing. These experts provide more enriched contextual insights across your entire attack surface, using their experience and skills to interpret the results of automated scans, perform deeper analyses of exposures, identify genuine threats, and recommend appropriate mitigation measures to help you strengthen your security posture.

See how BreachLock can help reinforce your CTEM program with a free demo.

About BreachLock

BreachLock is a global leader in offensive security, delivering scalable and continuous security testing. Trusted by global enterprises, BreachLock provides human-led and AI-powered Attack Surface Management, Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS), Red Teaming, and Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) solutions that help security teams stay ahead of adversaries.

With a mission to make proactive security the new standard, BreachLock is shaping the future of cybersecurity through automation, data-driven intelligence, and expert-driven execution.

Know Your Risk. Contact BreachLock today!

References

1. Gartner. (2024). Press Release: Gartner Identifies the Top Cybersecurity Trends for 2024. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-02-22-gartner-identifies-top-cybersecurity-trends-for-2024

Author

BreachLock Labs